this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2026
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Open Source was not invented yet, back then.
Sort of?
Open source was the historical default. The settings on your radio are just the settings on your damn radio, nobody "owns" that. Ditto for mechanical looms a century earlier. Intellectual property for records, works of literature and (very relevantly) player piano scrolls anticipated software, but in all cases that was down to an aspect of being a kind of performance, rather than purely technical. Patents have their own weird history, but they evolved directly from mercantilist/feudal government-granted monopolies, rather than from them being a kind of product.
The earliest computers were bespoke, so the teams responsible for building and maintaining them also programmed them. Open vs. closed isn't really a relevant question for the programs themselves, then. The algorithms you might use in the programs made their way around through academic publications, or word of mouth.
AFAIK, the Apollo missions were the first time large-scale software engineering happened, the way we're used to. Lots of effort was put into the hardware, but then the overlooked software part became an unexpected grind. It was all in assembly, people weren't talking to each other, and the wheel was reinvented many times. To everyone's surprise, it was the money pit and source of delay, and the finished product ended up having issues during the flights, as well.
Obviously, from there, proprietary software became more and more prevalent. It was the era where businesses were buying up mainframes and minicomputers, and software companies could be just another contractor component sold in whatever smoke filled boardroom. I don't know if open source would have been practical, when you only have 50 users, but still a sizeable, ugly code base that does everything from scratch.
Once you move into the personal computer era, you start to see open source as we know it grow back, and very slowly start winning. Since you can copy software easily and infinitely, whatever collection of volunteers turns out to be enough. There's no scarcity to drive an actual market.